I need to end this!

Endings are just beginnings backwards. I am making a start.

A Madness of a Different Kind.

For K life has been a cyclone ride in Essel World, there is a slow drawn high and then a steep fall. Then a smaller slower drawn high and then again a fall. You get the picture. It’s an adventure, may not always be a pleasant one, none the less an adventure.

Love has played a good deal of a part in K’s life. Love for the roar of an ageing lion in National Park, a frenzied stray puppy drowning in a gutter, the quadrangle of Ruparel, the chaos of train travel, the most beautiful fragrances of the Khao gully, the lost land of education built on a swamp, a crazed, solitude friendly, mute, mathematician, love for the kind Black Pearl, for the dingy apts, for all the envy, love for my first byline. For meeting popular people, beautiful people with great lives; Love for the twinkle in the eye of a gossip monger, love for the death of it all, love for contentment and the boredom it brought, love for the risk of spoiling it all, and then going ahead and spoiling it all. The guilt, the excuse, the oh, what the fuck!, and the moving on…

The first time Oyster Seeker was in my bedroom, I was showing him my nick-knacks. I was happy with my all enclosed life and he zapped at it.  A long while later, he told me that it was the weirdest thing he had seen – A woman, who kept everything neatly folded in boxes,  then she opened them, unfolded everything and re-arranged the already arranged and put them back into boxes.

Everything time I do it, I remember of him. Today I am doing it again, and as I see from this point on, my life looks quite like my favorite hobby.

It is indeed quite inconsequential, like a circus in circles.   

smell of vacancy

An empty room, a suitcase in the process of being filled.

OR

A desolate mind, a cold road, a funny joke, an alive lover - an impossible love story.

Sometimes, when things are just too perfect - life makes you peek into a small ventilator and what you see.....

Polka Dotted Memory

Selective is the word I like to use. I have a thread-like memory and I am unreasonably proud of it. Loud-mouth and Monarch have a photographic memory- they remember every single thing I said, wore, did! The latter uses it against me in an argument and the former doesn't. I live by convenient memories of people, places and experiences: it's a technique- if I like it, I keep it. What I don't like, goes- period.

There is a horrific drawback to these colourful specks of polka dots. The background of everything that is not there-- the islands becomes so arbitrary. 'x' thing in a person stays 'y' is excluded. Derrida would have argued and the lit freak in me would agree that everything is complete in itself and does not look outside to determine it's existence.

What happens to the fabric around? Who will weave that? Do mixed facts count as realities? Can choice come without a package? Is having the best moments as the only moments sinful? Why can't we only relish the delicious and garbage the bland? I don't have answers and frankly I ain't looking for any.

I love making and having collages around me precisely for this reason. They make a pretty picture- jumbled realities, torn parts that recollect the hollow in a page. Every piece was picked up over time and has found its place on a creme, burgundy, cobalt, turquoise or crimson hand-rolled paper. A secular Tibetan script art juxtaposing MTV's trance images.

Moreover they are my life: fancy, thought provoking and above all picture perfect!

personal/impersonal

Blogs aren't e-diaries anymore: maybe they were never meant to be.

So many posts on things personal yet very impersonal to blogists-- say photography, politics, fashion, mothering, location, technology, marathon: for god sake! i was befuddled by this colleague's blog-- nothing negative about it, but it challenged my reason for giving mine some direction :~))

i know, I know. Me super-confused, greedy, mere mortal has never made a directional change! What to do i was born in 1982, the year of consumerism.

Back on track, the Q is: can our blog spaces be closed and personal?

I was pulled up last evening for scribbling about-- .sin, the monk, married men and boobs, by my friends. Paris asked something incredibly honest, "Why is it up there, miss opinion ?" Am i manking a point? Not at all, am I? I am filling the void with my all the shit that i cant say or all the mess that i feel. Also, I am perpetually bothered about judgement; even though i am careless about it posthumously. Then again, does it halt here?

Silly Obituary

31-10-1997 Princess Diana died, accidentally murdered by frustrated paparazzi/ by an overworked sleepy driver: the juicer truth. 4 days later Sep 5, 1997 Sister Teresa from Ireland died of heart attack.

Decade passed & the 2 women moved into oblivion. Not really now, just one did! Mother Teresa, 'the leprosy healer' from Cal is not so seriously recalled.

I know u remember her, but that's not the point: the point is --- my 12 year old friend doesn't! on the contrary she knows of Diana:" Di, princess, beautiful women, fairy tale wedding to king, king was in love with someone else, broke up, met poor kids, and one day died in a car- bike- chase with very rich boyfriend."

fairly correct, but when she asked 'who's mother Teressa?' my only way to remind her was 'remember a beauty queen resurrected this icon at Miss world?- Yup! gotcha. but she hasn't a clue this nun hailed from and what missionaries of charity was!?!

As I walked back, i thanked dad for donating all the unused, never going to be used stuff to the destitute home in Borivali, for taking us there on our birthdays. For scolding us if we cringed, for making us comfortable with uncomfortable existence of the diseased, destitute, ill and mentally challenged. They weren't pleasant, so wasn't the Cal trip n the missionaries of charity n sister nevedita.
The point is that i remember. - that history is alive for me. But then tweety was born a decade and a half later and her history is different. She never met Di but she's sad- more like a 'broken piece from a fairy tale' sad -- with much fear, i told her that 'ur Di was not a fairy and her prince wasn't a knight. Di and Charles are a projected dream reiterated by world media. She was rich, unconventionally beautiful, he was seasoned and apparently already in love with another lady, they had a very rocky marriage. The fact that Di was a bulimic was a sign of her unhappyness. Tweety refuted," But then she had a glorious death n she's freaking popular!"

That got me thinking- Does death by accident confirm that gore is glorious? U cant just die in sleep- that's boring! u have to die with drama, tragedy, controversy, burn marks, broken bones-- to leave ur mark in the society. Don't be Mata- be Mata Hari, be Gia Carangi, Frida, Protima, Plath, Woolf, be Marilyn Monroe.

Being good is passe, being troubled is marking ur territory. So here it is- Nothing better, bigger than a beautiful, rich, in-love or love-lorn, super lonely woman whose death questions the very definition of a free feminism bound by cliches of work, family and happiness.

Like they say in journalism: shock value is the only value!

PS. oddly i feel like an idiot writing this, hmm!

There is a crisis.

Turning 25 and still not having enough testosterone to hold? Hmmm, time to reflect. Multiples is 20 and has been with who, what and where-all. I am 24- had 2 imp guys,terribly disappointed with one. Now, she's trying to hook me up with the ones I could be teaching junior college English. It’s not funny. It’s a crisis situation and I am trapped.

The last I felt this confused, irate and helpless was at puberty. I was old enough to do anything; still not old enough to do anything. Now I am old enough for all the responsibility and the action ---I am having none. I am the new 24 and old 32: where everything is exhausted young (this digression will be dealt with in good time).

Men I like are married (happily or otherwise); the ones I date are looking for commitment. By the way,what is wrong with men? Since when did ‘I am looking for a long-term association’ become manly? -- In response, a male acquaintance noted that I was getting old and my options were narrowing, and isn’t it wonderful that so many guys want to really settle with you (a nasty invisible insertion was ‘knowing you’)? He also commented on the 'liberated woman syndrome' which was the cause of all anguish: '?' n '!' followed- all your friends r engaged!how was ur sis's baby shower? What do you do with your pay check except spend on shoes, clothes and drinks? (I will ignore the last Q).

Liberated women are farcical. i couldn't possibly accept that even if it's d truth. For, I remember, there was a time when sentences began with I and not WE. The sour part is that I don’t have a WE, graver than that is that I don’t want an ordinary WE. Am I too difficult and demanding? hmmm...

Mommies' are most cruel in this phase: your biological clock is ticking! you are going to get fat and lose the youthful lustre. You will be a hag trying to live on the scraps left by other women or bald men who u ignored forever, or a man wanting a lineage: you’ll be a baby machine; but the chances are low coz your clock is ticking!

I like children, as people like animals at the zoo. Children and marriage: my problem, is that I don’t see the connection.
I have myopia and its affecting my life in an extremely adverse way. The casual attitude has dulled out; nothing is just for the sake of it. I am not advocating one-night-stands but it’s just that more guys are behaving like girls.
When have you heard of a 25 year old guy married and ready to have his first baby-- they are now! Simply,no one wishes to wait and savour the time.

Torch asked me, 'what's wrong with that?' Nothing: it’s too dammed good! its what every woman wants. Just that I haven’t found my teddy bear, then again, I prefer a man in the good old dirty definition. I don't want these sensitive, emotional fools who break down and whine and crib and bitch. I want the cliched definition: clinched, not baggit, shark nichts dolphin! That is my problem*. There are only 3 real men that I have met ( Hubbles')and every where I turn to look there are only pretty pretty boys. Has ‘the man’ become a yeti? I am scared.

However the fearful aftermath is: it may be an ideal in my head but the chances of a woman’s utopia turning into a dystopia are always higher than its vice-verse. I am scared, the air is thinning.



PS* Theorists in my head are throwing hardbound notes of female, masculinity and androgene liberation at me. Elite mocking faces at their most hated display of disappointment and rage: aaaaaawwwwwaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!:(